2 comments:

The number of teachers who don't really know there subject matter is astounding. For example, I teach economics . . . I was asked to help write a 50 question standards based test . . . one of the three people on the panel kept insisting that one question, 'measuring' the currency exchange rate standard should be "Theunit of Japanese currency is known as a)the peso b)the dollar c) the yen or d) the pound." A couple ofyears later, I sat in on the district's panel to select the next economics text up for adoption. Free plug to Stephen Slavin; I and my coworker strongly supported his text: written in a conversational style that brought you in like no text I've ever seen; difficult concepts broken down in to parts and explained clearly; sidebars to refresh math skills any time something even remotely difficult came up, with admonishments to 'skip this if you already know how to do percents -- or graph a line --etc' It failed horribly. Why? "This book has too many graphs in it." If you can teach econ without graphs . . .I will eat your shoe. We wound up with a text I told my students to use as a doorstop.